An Era of Darkness by Shashi Tharoor; Aleph Book Company; Rs.699; Pages 294 In Britain and in India as evidenced by the success of television series such as Downton Abbey and latterly The Crown, there’s a rose-tinted nostalgia about the glory days of the British empire which ruled a quarter of the world, and particularly about the British Raj in India which spanned almost 200 years. The contra narrative of the much proclaimed benevolent British Raj in India is brilliantly presented by former UN diplomat and contemporary Indian politician Shashi Tharoor in the book under review. It’s an overdue reminder to people of both countries that ‘post-colonial melancholia’ is unwarranted, and the evil that the men from that rain-swept little island did in the hills and vast plains of the Indian subcontinent, far outweighed the good. Indeed, historical literature on benign imperial rule in pre-independence India has been routinely force-fed to several generations of children in the UK and India. More than the public of India, An Era of Darkness is recommended reading for the British public for the scales to fall from their eyes. “The need to temper British imperial nostalgia with postcolonial responsibility has never been greater,” writes Tharoor explaining the justification for penning this forensic indictment of British rule, born out of a May 2015 debate at Oxford University where he successfully argued in favour of the motion ‘Britain Owes Reparations to her Former Colonies’. The structure of this valuable revision of the whitewashed history of the British Raj, which children such as this reviewer learned even in post-independence India, lends itself to easy and highly-recommended reading. It addresses all the usual arguments advanced by Raj historians and their gullible Indian apologists, and proceeds to demolish them with convincing evidence sourced from objective English and American historians and intellectuals of conscience appalled by the brazen plunder, oppression, cruelty and incorrigible racism of the subaltern classes of Blighty, who transmogrified into the ‘nabobs’ of the British Raj in India. This contrarian chronicle of colonial India begins with an unqualified indictment from American historian Will Durante (1885-1981). In his book The Case for India (1930), Durante expressed “astonishment and indignation” about the “conscious and deliberate bleeding of India” by the British East India Company, and after 1857, by imperial Britain which instead of making amends for the unrestrained rapacity of the merchants-turned-warriors of the company, brought the power of the imperium to continue the plunder. Exploiting a temporary advantage in artillery warfare and liberally bribing and suborning gullible native nobility in the Indian princedoms against their rulers, the employees of the company quickly conquered vast swathes of territory, imposed punitive taxes, and destroyed Indian agriculture and industry – the thriving textiles, gems and jewellery and ship-building industries in particular. Citing the British economic historian Angus Maddison, Tharoor recounts that in 1700, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent. When the British departed almost two centuries later, it had reduced to 3 percent. Moreover it’s pertinent to note the Industrial Revolution which…
